Wet Earth
by if.the.plane.goes.down
Summary: But all the clocks in the city began to whirr and chime:Oh let not Time deceive you,you cannot conquer Time


Wet Earth

**And in the end the love you take**

**Is equal to**

**The love you make**

She follows the wet smell of sky and muddy Earth all the way to the tails of the universe. To the edges of her clump of recollected memories until she is standing in front of the gate, looking in at the bones of the old academy building.

Her muscles tense and a chord knotted tightly between her shoulder blades tries to unwrinkled just a bit, but she knows her age and she _is_ her body. She does not just belong to it. Sakura is old enough to know to control her strength even if the how is an uncertainty.

It does not help that the day reminds her of the Summer days of her youth, hot and red. Lovers holding hands and hiding out under the palm like fronds of large trees, to try at creating a delicate, unified beauty. The young faces of her comrades then, each and every one unstained and unlined by the pleasures of this world.

She remembers most vividly the Summer that Kurenai sensei cut her hair very short. When she got bored, when the clippers were within reach, she snipped, snipped, snipped away until the long dark tendrils darkened the floor, slightly curled like snakes. Until the tips of her hair just barely tickled the slightly pointy tips of her ears, and she looked like she was on fire.

Sakura used to stare at them for hours, the tips of her ears. The gently sloping points reminded her of the luscious, man-devouring vixens she used to read about in books way too old for her clandestine curiosity. Mythical women who laughed without restraint, and once they had taken a victim never bothered to look back.

Kurenai-sensei was glad when her hair grew back in. Sakura could tell then, because when it was short she was always pulling on the ragged ends with her nervous fingers when she thought no one was looking, as if she could tug it past her earlobes. The village men were glad too, most of them loved more than anything to tread their fingers through the satin waves, never ending rushes of black water.

Sakura liked seeing her _ears_. The other women said she was a witch. May'be it was all too much when she hooked Kakashi Hatake in the corners of her cattish, crimson smile, under the crescents of her red nails, traces of his flesh left behind there.

They were not supposed to. They were supposed to act like professionals, and not like humans. But sometimes they would sneak off into empty academy building rooms, behind large tree trunks on the training field, the palms of their hands itching. Once Sakura caught them kissing, she couldn't think of anything else. She could only think of Kurenai. Her velvet hair, her lips, red and plump like the juicy meat of a watermelon, her hands in Kakashi-sensei's silver hair. There must have been a spell.

Sakura's throat clogged with the promise of magic when she devised what to do. She was still young that Summer. Young and ignorant one might same, but then it all meant something more to her. And she wanted the taste of tongue and she wanted the feel of fine boned callused hands in her hair. And she wanted crimson lips.

When her parents were not home, Sakura made some homey ale from ginger root. She dyed her eyelashes a sinful black, darker than Kakashi's inky eyes with little cylinders of kohl. She combed her hair straight back, tucking it behind her ears, licking it up with water until it shone like strawberry wine, with the fresh promise of intoxication. And she was certain then he would not be able to resist coming in to her and bowing his head thirstily against the frothy waves of her hair. She would offer him her mouth to drink. She stuffed her bra and called him over for a drink. She left the ale on the kitchen counter and the door unlocked, and then she situated herself between the coveted prize and the door, her mouth lax, her legs swung open so that he could see the lines of her thighs.

He moved around her like a gull, dodging her well prepared spaces. He took the ginger root from on the other side of her, and she could feel the prickle of hairs as their arms touched, she could smell the golden boozy scent on his skin. Both standoffish and familiar, like the throat coating fragrance of all the old books in a library, finely aged almost to the point of decay.

He tilted back his beautiful throat and downed it all in one deep, close-eyed gulp. Then he straightened, wiping his mouth with his forearm and said "Well, you look like you've got to be off somewhere. So I'll be going, kid. Don't get into too much trouble, okay?" raising his salt and pepper eyebrows. And then, he left. And she was so mad she sat there on the counter, listening to all of the silence for hours, toilet paper melting in sweaty clumps between her breasts.

But the worst part was that he'd called her kid. She went and carved angry, putrid words in tiny letters into the grooves of the academy building. So small that no one, but her would ever notice they were there, would ever think to look. Not that they would have suspected her of doing it. None of them. Ever.

And after that he always looked at her with a strange color in his eyes. Closely as if he were trying to gauge whether her glasses were all half full or half empty. And after that she tried to look away when they kissed. She tried not to meet his questioning stares.

Until that misson he did not return from, when she had to be the one to slip his eyelids closed with a dainty finger. To rearrange the blown off bits of him, carefully like reassembling a giant jigsaw puzzle. They gave his dogtags to Kurenai even though it was Anko who had mothered his children. And they both cried.

And Sakura was happy even then that she had not gotten involved with that. She was so happy about it. She was so sad about it that she could not make it to the funeral because she could not stop crying long enough. Even when she filled her bathtub up to the top with water, sliding her body like white silk into, thinking of slowly sinking under. Even when she got down in it, up to her chin. And then decided that she had nothing left anyway. But even that was a terrible thing _more_ to lose.

To this day she wonders where they buried his bones. Hoping it was somewhere that the sunlight could touch him. Could engulf him and make him gleam, because he always seemed so void of color. He'd be an old man now, gnarled and gray, but not brittle. No. Still as beautiful and strong as the day she met him. Too beautiful almost to look at, almost so that it brought tears to unsuspecting eyes.

Sakura doesn't know why they locked up the gate to the old building. She has a feeling that Naruto had something to do with it. But there is no point in barring up the memories, metal and chains will not stop them. Nothing will ever make her and others like her forget. Not when the pain is so great.

She had a thin, flexible youth. She is no longer extremely flexible, but still thin. Almost painfully so if she's glimpsed in the wrong lighting, turned off kilter at just the wrong angle. But it's all lithe and muscle. Air and strength. Evidence of the brutish beauty she once was. Freckled cheeks and delicate pink eyelashes, like strings of perfectly pressed cotton candy.

Her body is among the only vanities that Sakura has left, then again if she were not still a working kunoichi it would hardly seem worth it. At any rate she can wriggle her hand through the bars of the gate, then her whole arm, wrestling her shoulder through, and with a little more effort her whole body.

She sinks down into the mud on the other side a little, and she wishes the rain would have waited to fall. Or that someone would put a little more effort into keeping up the grounds. Both things are beyond her control.

Sakura walks around to the back of the building, past all of the broken out windows, crisscrossed like blinded eyes with beams of wood. Wrappers and cigarette butts have to be kicked aside. The weeds are almost as tall as her, they try to curl around her neck. Her wrists.

She traces her hands along the building's flank, following the craggy stone with her fingers until she finds the letter she carved. Pitched into the stone with a kitchen knife all of years ago, sweating out her vehement anger, the knife slipping and sliding in her sweat soaked hands.

Her face gets hot now, but the raw emotions that so tightly gripped her in her youth have loosened their hold, becoming little more than impulses crouching on the back-stoop of her brain before she sends them away.

Sakura does not trust her knees enough to kneel. Instead she turns her back pressing it up against the sharp brick and gazes out at the ruined grounds. Broken architecture and litter stretching out for miles around her, the bare skeleton of a once magnificent city.

She can just make out the remnants of the old swings, tiny dots as if constructed from a child's building blocks in the distance. The actual swings are gone, someone having ripped them down, consumed with anger , or with lust, or with loss. The chains that once held the swings a loft hang limply down like fractured limbs, useless in their brokenness.

A familiar gnawing feeling rises up in her gut then, as if a flurry of moths had flown in through her open nostrils and were making themselves content chewing holes through her insides. There were days when in the earliest parts of winter mornings they sky was clear. So clear that you could look through it and see anything you wanted to, anything that you believed was up there beyond the clouds. On a morning like that she gripped the swing poles so tightly the frost synced them together, her skin turning silver like the metal. Into icy iron. That was where Sasuke came to die.

She found him there early in the morning, mercilessly before anyone else did. Thinking back on it now, Sakura doesn't remember her reasoning for wandering on the academy grounds then, but she did and there he was, curling in on himself like a flower. A black rose rotting itself darker than its petals.

For as long as she has known him she has always thought of him as a house. A narrow, solid building, all delicate architecture. Blown over by a strong wind if you knew which brick to loosen. His heart had always been her favorite room. And as time went by she took to lounging there, secretly at first then more openly. She was always careful about the door, cautious to keep it cracked, but not open.

He was a beautiful boy, even when he did not believe. When he discovered himself a little less so. She was powerless to stop him either way, they all were. All of them except Naruto. And he showed no reserve.

Sasuke was bleeding from every outlet when she found him. He was beyond saving. And as she crept closer and closer she knew he was going to die. His face was stolid beneath all of the blood, a thin vein throbbing between his creased brows. But his eyes were like a does' wide and far away, paralyzed with a sudden realization and she wondered what kind of heaven he was seeing. She didn't think he could feel her touch, when she leaned down to smooth his hair matted against his busted scalp with crusted blood. Being a medic nin she was used to the oozing gore. But somehow it was different that the blood was his. All his. Her hands began to tremble. Perhaps Naruto would not have been so vicious if it wasn't for the baby.

He wanted to die in her arms. But she couldn't have that. She couldn't carry that weight. Would not be able to go on living with the hushed feel of all the breath leaving his body, left behind as a tattooed residue on her hands. She had never denied him anything. But she could not give him _that_. And so he died beside her. And she watched the air rushing in gentle waves from the puncture wounds in him until he was still, until the sky was the satin color of his hair.

She let them take his body apart. It was to keep his secrets they said, but may'be it was out of Naruto's pain. When everyone could be certain that Sasuke was dead Naruto asked her to marry him. And if anyone exerted any force, it was in her, forcing herself to say yes.

When the baby was finally born she swaddled him in silken linens, warmly cradling his head against her shoulder, as she laid him gently in a lid-less basket and set him on the nearest river offering him to the open world. No one needed to know that he had a head full of ebony hair, richly embedded with blue like the plumed feathers stretching tautly across a ravens muscled back. She watched him float away, memorizing the texture of his tiny fists, the faintest tint of rose petal pink to his skin, like the surface of a pearl.

Sakura got pregnant again. And then again. And then again. This time each of them boys, each of them tow headed and robins-egg-blue eyed, with wide grinning mouths. So then everyone was alright, and everyone could let out a collective held breath. And then Sakura could spend hours alone in bed while the children ran amuck with her head under a mountain of pillows. And then Sakura could tell Naruto "I love you" without having to first ask him to turn away first. Then she could pretend that she did not dream of black feathers, and wake up with the taste of fowl in her mouth, plumes sticking to her tongue in wet strings.

And she could almost pretend that she no longer sat in the tub with the water up to her chin, daring herself to see what kind of heaven could lie just beneath the surface; and that she no longer searched the muddy river banks for black roses at midnight. Remembering the thorny touch of another lover's love.

She can't stop herself from wondering what became of her baby. Whispering the name she has given him in her sleep. Karasu. Raven. On the worst of days she worries that he has become like his father was. Cold and alone, turning all to black on the inside. On the best of days she wonders if he's dead. If he's out there looking for her. If he remembers the scent of her, the way his infant weight is always present in her mind, the warm, sour scent of his milky baby's breath against her neck.

Sakura worries for her other three children. Naruto's boys. Wonders if one day they will realize that what she is giving them is only half love. That she gingerly ties their shoelaces, and kisses their broad grinning cheeks, and gets their milk just right, testing the temperature on the soft insides of her wrist because she has to. Because it is expected of her. Not because she cares. Or holds anything for them that is even remotely close to the delicate, burning love she had for Karasu. That is why she had to set him free to fly away.

Despite everything she hopes the boys can forgive their father. Or at least come to understand his absences and his bitterness. You can't be blamed for what you become, at least not wholeheartedly.

Sakura steps around a patch of spiny brambles curving into an archway over a treasure trove of used condoms. Something glints in the faded sunlight and she sees the window. The only one still intact amongst all the gaping black squares hanging open like infant's mouths with their tiny jagged glass teeth.

She stops and studies herself carefully in the soft, honeyed light. Perhaps she came here again to say goodbye. But may'be it is a little more so than that. In the back of her heart down a chunk of winding steps in a tiny room she keeps locked and never opens. Is a little girl with long shining hair and a wide, blemish free grin. A little girl who still believes in magic and good in the world.

_She_ came in search of a glimpse of silver hair, the faintest scent of golden booze staining the green flak of a canvas vest in the air. _She_ came to find a little boy with blue-black hair climbing out of a basket, a boy with bottomless eyes. A man with the same hair, with the same eyes, with a mouth like a mighty whip lashing her a thousand kisses.

Sometimes Sakura wonders if her boys miss her while she's gone at all. If Naruto is thinking of her, while he sits robed and regal in his office signing insignificant papers. Or if he is only preoccupied with thoughts of overtaking the world. But mostly she thinks of black roses and ravens with watchful eyes, and ginger root and the touch of his bone white hands. And it seems enough to have been loved even if it was only once.

Despite all these years, she is still the rabbit hearted fool with not enough voice or chance to tell her story. But considering the bottomless eyes she has known, and the trails curving down a body she has traveled, that is okay. In the unbroken glass she can see all of the lines creasing her face. Every string of syntax and punctuation mark.


End file.
